


not even lions

by alpacas



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Gen, even better: platonic soulmate au time, hey guys it's soulmate au time, i need to stop writing stupid aus but HOW CAN I, shamelessly stole someone else's idea off of tumblr but how could i not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-20 06:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20671019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacas/pseuds/alpacas
Summary: nott as the name 'bren' on her arm.caleb has the name 'veth' on his.they don't know.and then they do.





	1. BREN

**Author's Note:**

> i saw a tumblr post about this idea and it is SO GOOD and please someone tell me which mad genius had this idea because it is literally galaxy brain god tier and i can only desperately try to rip it off & do it justice

Veth barely sleeps the night before she turns sixteen. That’s the age, after all. The time it shows for most people, if they’re going to have one at all. Dominant arm, so Veth’s right. Not everyone has them. Maybe one in four people. They can be any sentient species, but usually they’re similar. Halflings with halflings or humans, that sort of thing. Of the matches, maybe half of them are friendship matches. Concomitants, they’re called. The other half are _soulmates_. Romantic bonds. True love.

She’s been doing the research. Asking around the village.

Veth knows which she’s hoping for.

She lies in bed, under the eaves of the roof. She keeps looking at her arm. Raising it above her head. Turning and splaying it out so she can see it on her side. Midnight passes. She squints in the dim moonlight from the tiny window.

Dawn creeps in. The sky grays.

She waits. Squinting at her arm. For the four letters she knows will soon appear.

Veth wakes without realizing she’d fallen asleep. Just a disorienting shift, the light suddenly brighter and changed. She’s foggy and hot, tangled in her quilt. Blinks and sits up and yanks her arm up — tossing her pillow to the floor — her heart racing, because she sees letters, she sees a name, four letters, four blocky shapes, marching down the inside of her arm, the first letter brushing against the soft skin inside her elbow. Painlessly. Silently. The name itself is light, lighter than her skin, the gray of snowy skies, soft clouds, warm rainy days inside the shop while the kids play in their room, a vision of the future, a vision she’d expected, the name —

And then blinks. Her vision must be —

Y E Z A.

That’s the name she’s expecting. Should have. The name she’s been planning, they’ve both been planning on: she sees the way he’s been looking at her arm. These past few weeks. She’s two months older than him, after all. Yeza. That’s her soulmate. Always has been.

B R E N, it says.

She’s never heard that name before at all.

She wears long sleeves that morning. Makes breakfast for her family. They’ve not so cold they’ve forgotten it’s her birthday, but no one mentions it. Dad just gives her a few extra coins. Tells her to buy something nice for dinner. Dinner she’ll be cooking, but, oh well.

Her brothers don’t say anything. But Veth’s not much up for talking. They don’t mention Marks, which is good. But then, none of her family has them. She was going to be the first. She was going to have Yeza, and they were going to get married and have kids and a shop and a garden. She —

Her stomach cramps up. Her throat closes up. She bites her tongue and does it too hard, gasps at the pain, the world-ending sharpness, enough that her brother looks over at her. Her eyes water. She doesn’t tough it out.

Yeza’s not going to want to be with her now.

Veth pushes back from the table. Leaves the house. Just goes. Who cares if they think she’s weird. They do that already.

She goes down to the river. Walks restlessly on the bank, rubbing at her arm through her sleeve until the cloth starts to chafe at her, set her skin to itching. Good. Good! She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want this — this mark. This name. This stupid asshole name. Bren, she thinks. _Bren Bren Bren_. Rhymes with wren. And hen. Pictures a bird, squawking, gangling, covered in — in zits. In sores. Big ears! Red face! A nebulous bird-person, ugly and screeching. How? How could — how could it be like this?

She should just throw herself into the river — ! But Veth doesn’t so much as wade in. She’s not going to do that. She knows. She sits on the shore and waits to cry, but can’t even do that. Just sits there, hopelessly. Head in her hands. Rubbing her forehead. Worrying the hurt part of her tongue against the backs of her teeth.

_Bren._ Rhymes with _then_. Ten. When, again, den. It means nothing. It sounds like everything. It’s stupid. It’s useless.

No wonder it’s hers.

At last she gets up the nerve to go to town. Rubbing her sleeve the whole while, head bowed, avoiding eyes and faces. It’s not too hard. She’s not very tall, even among other halflings.

She isn’t sure what to say. But she thinks she knows what Yeza will say, and that’s even worse: he’ll say it’s okay. That it doesn’t change anything. Between them, or at all. But it’s _not_ okay. He’s supposed to be her soulmate. He is. She’s known that since day one, since moment one, since they had that stupid kissing dare and he’d been blushing after.

And there’s something else, too. What if when his birthday comes along…

If he’s not _her_ soulmate, then she’s definitely not his.

She imagines him getting the name of some other girl, some pretty, smart girl. Her stomach curdles. She wants to throw up. Her eyes prickle with tears. It’s not supposed to be like this.

Veth can’t bear to say anything when she reaches the apothecary, which is empty this early in the morning. Yeza has a little room in the back; Madame lives upstairs. He has to take care of her, cook and clean, as well as take his lessons and help in the shop. Basically all the things Veth has to do at home, except when he’s done he’ll be an alchemist and get a shop of his own, and all she gets is to get married.

That hadn’t seemed bad at all before this morning.

She lets herself in the back door. There’s a key in one of the pots, but Veth never needs it. Yeza never locks the door.

She peeks in his room. He’s still asleep. Snoring softly, his face pressed into the pillow, bundled into his blankets. Usually she’d find this super cute. Now Veth clutches her sleeve again.

She makes breakfast for the second time this morning.

The smell of cooking sausage rouses Yeza, his hair messier than usual, squinting, emerging barefoot from his room. He grins to see her. “Veth! Happy birthday!”

She turns towards the stove when he goes to hug or kiss her. He falls back and she feels guilty, gets that acid burn feeling in her belly again. Takes a deep breath that doesn’t seem to give her a lot of air, and pushes up her sleeve, sticks it blindly towards Yeza with her eyes squeezed shut.

Imagines him grinning. Imagines his face falling. The disappointment, and then anger. They’ll break up over breakfast. She’s had time to think it over. He’ll say: it’s fine, I don’t care if you’re my soulmate or not. She’ll say, I’m letting you go. You’ll find someone real nice. We can still be friends. Maybe she’ll say: I love my real soulmate, I don’t care about you. But she doesn’t think she has the nerve. The guts.

The ability to say something so untrue.

He doesn’t say anything.

Maybe he’ll get angry. You led me on, you lied to me. How dare you. That kind of thing. Her arm shakes, from nerve, from keeping it extended. The sausages start to burn. The scent fills her nose and she feels sick again, hot and cold all over, her stomach and chest on fire, her fingers and toes and ears frostbitten and cold.

_Bren_, her heart is pounding. _if Bren - then yen - for other - men_

She hates this.

“Veth,” Yeza says. “Vethy,” he says, a nickname she genuinely hates, but she can’t move. Except she’s also shaking. Trembling. Cold and sick. She looks over at him then, with blurry, frightened vision.

He’s smiling, a look she knows well. He takes her hand in both of his, and then he’s hugging her, and she means to be strong and noble and resist but doesn’t. She just burrows herself against him. As best she can. “Vethy, honey,” he says. “It’s okay. My last name’s Brenatto.”

They get married a week after Yeza’s 20th birthday.

No name had ever appeared on his arm. She’d been terrified until after his birthday had come and gone, that at any moment a word would materialize. But nothing had.

He trains and learns and she does too. Helps out at the shop more and more. Helps take care of Madame until she passes. Learns to take over the books, manage a budget. It comes easy for her, but Yeza’s useless with numbers. Madame’s nephew inherits the shop. Offers Yeza a job, not an apprenticeship, but he decides to forge ahead on his own. Felderwin can support more than one apothecary, and Yeza’s interests — and Veth’s interests — are skewed more towards chemistry than medicines.

They buy a house that had belonged to a cloth merchant, that has the front half all set up for a small shop, a basement for storage. Veth paints the rooms. Yeza plants a garden. They wait, pretending at chastity and a lack of expectation, until first Veth and then Yeza turn twenty. Until they are adults by law.

They marry, and the house is ready for them to move in already.

They marry, and Veth has a surname for the first time in her life.

They marry, and she tells herself she believes what he’d said when they were teenagers. That Bren really is just short for Brenatto.

They’d planned on a large family, but Veth gets pregnant almost right away and it takes them both by surprise. That it happened just like that. He asks her if she’s sure, but she’d known almost right away, what must have only been days later. Not with sickness, but just a sense. Maternal instinct, she calls it.

She’s barely twenty.

The pregnancy goes smoothly. She doesn’t get sick much, and the baby kicks and tosses and makes her restless, antsy and impatient. They go for long walks around Felderwin, through the fields, along the river. Collecting plants, skipping stones. Yeza’s the one who gets anxious, who gets nervous. Will he be a good parent? Will he know how to take care of a baby, a child? Veth’s usually the worrier of the two of them, but she bobs through her pregnancy, serene, happy. Walking four or five miles a day until almost the moment she goes into labor.

She almost wants to name him Bren. But that would be weird, Bren Brenatto. And it would come off a little creepy.

She doesn’t think too much about her soulmate anymore, the snow-gray letters, the bird name. She doesn’t have to. Not with her husband, not with Luc. The odds of meeting someone new in a small town like Felderwin, anyway —

They’re not good. And _that_ is good.

She hopes she never does.


	2. VETH

Bren falls in love with Astrid right away. Everything about her. Her sharp eyes. Crooked nose. Her soft, smooth skin. The dark freckles of her forearms, scattered between scars like stars in clouds. Her thin wrists and small hands. He loves her for her mind and her talents and her ability. He loves her purely. Truly. Untainted by baser desires.

But he lies awake at night. Imagining those long fingers.

Astrid doesn’t have a Mark. _Einritzen_, they call it in Zemnian, where it means something carved in, something written fast and firm. Astrid doesn’t have one. Her perfect arms are bare. Tanned. Freckled. Unmarked.

She sees his crush, his disappointment. Smiles knowingly and doesn’t address it. Even later on. Even after other things.

Eodwulf is the one who does it. Pulls Bren aside a couple of weeks before his sixteenth birthday. Wraps his arm around Bren’s neck like he’s going to choke him, fucking around, mussing his hair. “They always match up, you know,” is what he says, jumping right into it.

“What does?” Bren asks, pretending he doesn’t already know.

Eod slings his arm over Bren’s shoulders. “Just don’t think you’re gonna wake up next week with Astrid’s name on your arm.”

He feels himself blushing. “I haven’t been.” He has been. A lot. Even knowing as well as Eodwulf: that they always match. That if Astrid has no name, Bren will have no name either. That it doesn’t make them any _less_. That nearly eighty percent of adults of sentient races also do not have inscriptions; there is no shame in it.

Except. _Except._ Is Bren not — are the three of them not — (but himself, especially. Is he not the best at magic? The quickest at their lessons? The most powerful, the best memory? He does not doubt or underestimate their friends. The three of them — they are each superior, each better, each — _more_ — and is that not why Trent chose them? _Recognized_ them?

And is he not —

And so does he not — _deserve_? No, not deserve. But isn’t it only right, only the next _logical conclusion_, that he, that his love, that _they_ should in turn…)

Also. He _loves_ Astrid. He can’t look at her without losing his breath. Without distraction and pain and longing and want. How can her name _not_ be on his arm?

Eodwulf plays the fool at times, but he’s no less sharp than Bren and Astrid. He gives Bren a knowing look. Rolls up his left sleeve. Past the healing welts, up to the elbow. A wide, shiny scar is there. “Did I ever tell you? I had a mark,” he says. _Einritzen_, he says. It has another translation. _Incision_.

Bren’s never seen one scarred over. Removed. Read stories, of grieving lovers, that sort of thing. But Eod’s never mentioned anything like that. “Had it removed, of course. I’ll tell you what Master Ikithon told me, and what he’d tell you if our Astrid’s name _does_ bloom up in a few days. Love is noble if it’s love of service to our family and our country —“ Eod gestures between the two of them. Uses a word that can mean both _family_ and _group_, in Common. “But the kind of love of commoners, of plays and soulmates and destiny, that’s beneath you, Bren. It’s beneath us all. We don’t serve some mystical destiny, we _create our own path_. Let those under us be weak.”

Bren’s heart stirs — he feels his chin lift, reminded, proud, Eod echoing the beating of his heart, the knowledge: _yes, I am. Yes, we are_. The pulse of his body. His arms and head and heart.

But still.

“Assie’s glad she doesn’t have one. I’m glad I don’t have one. You should remember that and be glad to,” Eod says, rolling down his sleeve. The lecture finished.

True. It’s hard to deny.

But. Still.

He wakes up on his sixteenth birthday and looks at his arm.

He can’t help it. Even knowing better, even knowing not to want it — he looks. Imagines silly, childish things. Rolls over to his side and looks at his right arm —

V E T H

He blinks foggily. Confused.

The four letters are a green that’s almost blue, almost gray. A murky, indistinct color. A murky, indistinct name, one Bren mouths to himself, unsure of their pronunciation: Vess? Vet? He isn’t even sure if it belongs to a boy or a girl.

His mind clears slowly. Only now does he feel the sick dryness in his mouth and throat. He’d hoped — but he’d known — it wouldn’t be Astrid. But this —

Who is this?

He wears long sleeves. It’s not uncommon. His friends wish him a Happy Birthday. They eat breakfast together. Eod joking. Astrid sitting close. She gives him a kiss on the cheek.

They have lessons. That evening, Bren receives a letter from his parents, wishing him a happy birthday, hoping for his return home soon. He writes back. He has dinner with his friends. They give him books and a new coat. He takes a long walk with Astrid. He writes a letter home.

He tries to put it out of his mind.

But he’s never found things easy to forget.

There are other memories. Memories he does not share. Walks with Astrid. Hours with Astrid. The teasing his parents gave him, when he did come home. No, I didn’t have a mark, he tells them, using the meaning to imply _incision_.

By then, he’d told Master Trent about it. He’d told Astrid and Eodwulf about it. He’d had the word, the strange, foreign name, dealt with. Ignored. Forgotten.

I don’t have a Cut, he tells his parents. They smile and tease him. He wears long sleeves: to hide the small scars. To hide the large one.

You’re both right, of course, he tells Astrid, one evening they’re together. The real strength is in being able to choose.

Yes! Exactly! she says, triumphant. We’ve been chosen and so we choose in turn. I love you not because of some silly _destiny_, but because _I have decided it._

You love me?

She smiles.

There are many things he tries to forget. There are some he keeps close. And remembers.

When he wakes up, he is Bren.

And then he is not.

He’s Martin for a while.

Then he’s Frans.

Leo. Jon. Jack. Bert.

He tries to keep it simple. Common. Slowly expands out of the Zemni Fields. Marc. Yuval. Root. Reed. Yusef. Harald. Dayvad.

“Caleb,” he says when the shopkeeper asks his name.

“Family name to go with that?”

He’s been lingering too long. He knows it. He sees the shopkeep looking at him and he feels it: the itch of his hair, his scalp, his neck, his beard. His clothes heavy and hot. He can smell himself, and he knows it must be worse for the Halfling man looking him over. He knows. He knows a man like him has no place in a bookshop.

But he is sure — so sure — that the red cover of the book behind the counter is inscribed with magical sigils. Faded. And yet —

“I just — I was wondering if perhaps I could look at a few of your books.” Don’t say which, of course. That lets the shopkeep know what you’re after. Lets him take it away. He tries to look bashful, self-aware.

“Caleb, eh?”

“Ah - _ja_.” He rubs his arms. First by his wrists, then higher — his left hand shooting up his sleeve, past the older scars to the crook of his elbow. The same man, the same cause, but a different purpose. Not to experiment, but to protect. To protect him from —

The shopkeeper is staring. He (he does not think of himself by name, not anymore) is aware that his hands are filthy. His bandages stained by sweat and dirt. He smiles. “Forgive me. Have a good day. I will be on my way…”

But he’s not entirely surprised when the Crownsguard catch up to him only a few streets away.

They throw him in jail.

A string of robberies lately. He’s the obvious suspect, and he has been stealing ever since he arrived in town. He can’t blame them for guessing. Invents a surname while being dragged to the Lawmaster. Is thrown into a cell.

The walls are stone, which isn’t promising. There’s a pile of hay in the corner, smelling none too fresh.

He sits down against the wall.

He rubs the crook of his elbow. He wishes he had Frumpkin. He does, of course. He is never truly away from his cat. But if the guards knew he had magic, even just a little bit… it might make things inconvenient. Harder, if it comes to it. He isn’t keen on giving up even the slightest advantage.

But for now, he doesn’t mind jail.

At least he has a roof over his head. It had looked as though it might rain.

He counts the minutes. He rubs his arm.

The scar is knotty and not very neatly done. The other scars had healed much cleaner — but they had of course been smaller. He hasn’t looked at it in a long time. A quick glance when he’d escaped, up and down his arms, in a panic to confirm what was and was not real. The name was lost to the scar tissue. The watery ink replaced with whitish flesh.

It’s that easy. It’s that uncomplicated. If it were truly destiny, could it so easily be scraped from your skin?

He goes cold. Remembering the voice. The words. This wasn’t what he wanted to think about. Not that he has much on his mind these days. Not much to do besides run and steal and hide. Covet books that get you landed in prison.

He does wonder about his soulmate sometimes. If the words vanished from their skin when Trent scraped them from his. But mostly: what is their life like? He imagines them a harmless life. A job as a teacher of small children. No skill at magic, but a keen gardener.

His soulmate is married. Has a few children, another on the way.

His soulmate is skinny and red haired.

His soulmate cares for aging parents. Gladly. Happily.

He knows.

He _knows_.

“What a mess you have found yourself in,” he murmurs.

It starts to rain.

The roof leaks badly.

He — whoever he is — has a dream that everything is okay. His parents are alive. They have been all along. Their deaths were the trick, their murder the false memory. He doesn’t believe it at first. Then he weeps, for the relief and the joy of it. As soon as he believes them, they turn. Screaming and clawing. How could you believe such a thing? How could you forget? They scratch and bite and cut at him. The wounds burn and pinch. He is on fire, he is burning, he is —

He wakes sweating and panting. Something moves away from him in a flash and a shriek, dives towards the moldy hay — he is upright, clutching his amulet, summoning fire — “I’m sorryI’m sorryI’msorry, you were shouting!”

A blur of words. A hoarse, shaking voice. A memory of being pinched.

He doesn’t release the flames. He doesn’t throw them, either.

Yellow cat eyes. An impression of too many teeth. Moving, twitching ears. Hunched bony shoulders. “Are you okay?” the voice whispers. “You were having a bad dream.”

It is often written in books: He knew before she spake her name. From first sight, first glance. She says: My name is Genuivive. And he says: Yes. I knew.

The man who will be Caleb just thinks:

She’s terrified.

Too.


End file.
